The Zookeepers' War Read online

  Even with construction approved, it was not yet certain how—and with what—the animal park would be built. All projects for the coming year were already accounted for. There were neither funds nor materials nor workers available for this one. Dathe knew that without additional resources and support from the people of Berlin, all his planning could come to naught. All this “ambling about,” as he called it, unsettled him. He was still grappling with his decision to leave his hometown and “relocate to the sea of houses that made up the giant city of Berlin.” At times he even thought of chucking it in and staying in Leipzig.

  One short week later Deputy Mayor Fechner visited to let him know that the go-ahead had been given. Heinz Graffunder had been awarded a contract to design the new zoo on the grounds of the Friedrichsfelde park. The animal park, to be named Tierpark Berlin, would comprise four hundred acres, making it more than five times larger than the old zoo in the West.

  The following week, Dathe traveled south to the city of Cottbus to look at a park in which a small zoo for domestic animals was being set up. Quite in vogue at the time, these were mostly simple enclosures featuring native wildlife species, often begun by local forest rangers, vocational school groups, or animal lovers acting on their own. Then Dathe continued on to Berlin.

  There, an entirely different task lay ahead for him, arguably his most difficult one yet: he had to convince the people of Berlin that they wanted an animal park. Berliners were curious about everything new and unfamiliar, but quite obstinate when it came to parting with cherished traditions. The Western sector already had a zoo—and one that was cheap to visit, with one East German mark worth four Western ones. They had no need for a second zoo, let alone one with a Saxon as its director.

  About two hundred people showed up at the school building on Rüdersdorfer Strasse that September evening. When Dathe entered the room, no one recognized him. The visitors sat in small groups: a few elderly women up front who were determined to kill the project that very evening, farther back several garden plot holders poised to fight for the bungalows they’d built illegally at the edge of the overgrown castle grounds. Somehow, Dathe thought to himself as he took his place at a long table at the front of the room, he had to get all these people on his side.

  Dathe began by showing a short film about the Leipzig Zoo in order to set the visitors’ minds at ease. (Animals always did the trick.) Grumbling gradually yielded to a murmur of approval. Now it was time to introduce his plans.

  Animals Onstage

  In the two decades that he had been in the field, Dathe had come up with his own philosophy of zoos. Zoos were there, he insisted, for visitors, not for experts. It did not matter to him whether visitors noticed why a zoo was beautiful, so long as they noticed that it was. Its crucial functions were to educate and entertain. He wanted to move away from the classic zoo, and he sought to whet Berliners’ appetites for a new zoo, to show visitors what the cramped urban zoo in the West could not provide: an expansive park with spacious enclosures for large groups of animals. But if he announced that here, to Berliners still enamored with the only zoo they knew, he might as well pack up his bags and leave. So he tried to involve the public, asking people for their suggestions for what the new park should be like. Dathe emphasized that he intended the animal park to complement the zoo in the West in its design and choice of animals. He aimed to present the animals as though they were on a theater stage. No pens, no fences, little decoration on the enclosures—nothing to divert visitors’ attention. That was nothing new. Back at the beginning of the twentieth century, Carl Hagenbeck had enticed people to his animal park in much the same way. The zoos in Leipzig and even Berlin had been using this principle for quite some time. But no zoo director had ever had as much space to work with as Dathe would.

  “But don’t expect us to perform magic!” he warned his audience. “It will take years.”

  Also on the evening’s program were East Berlin’s deputy mayor, Herbert Fechner, Heinz Graffunder, the animal park’s architect, and Leipzig Zoo director Karl Max Schneider. Dathe had Graffunder present the first sketches of the enclosures so that people could visualize them and look forward to seeing more. Finally it was Schneider’s turn. He started by heaping praise on Dathe and declaring that he was bidding Dathe goodbye with a heavy heart. Dathe, hearing his boss express this sort of sentiment for the very first time, was quite taken aback.

  Schneider announced that he would make a gift to the new zoo. Since the 1920s, the Leipzig Zoo had been famous for its lion breeding, earning it the nickname the “lion factory.” Several thousand cubs had been born in the ensuing decades for export all the way to South Africa. “The only way to escape receiving a lion as a gift from Leipzig is by suicide,” Schneider quipped that evening in his closing remarks. A lion was not the kind of animal he had in mind, however. With a big smile, Schneider continued, “But a bear would be more suitable as the heraldic animal of Berlin, so we’re breaking with tradition. Berlin will have to bear with its first bear.” His punning pronouncement was greeted with approving applause.

  Schneider sat back down with a grin. Only he and Dathe were aware that his generous gift of a bear suggested not only originality, but also frugality. A bear is much cheaper to acquire than a lion.

  One of the garden plot holders in the back row stood up and made his way to the front of the room. “Here we go,” Fechner murmured to Dathe, who until then had been relieved by how smoothly everything had been going. But there was no cause for concern. “Everything you’ve presented us here, gentlemen, sounds really good,” the man said. “So I promise you on behalf of the District Association of Small Livestock Breeders, Garden Plot Holders, and Homesteaders that we’ll support the animal park. And just so you can see I mean that seriously, I’ll donate the first hundred marks for spades.” Another man went on to pledge ten hours of construction, as did a student at the Academy for Planned Economy. These gestures proved decisive in turning public opinion around. The press soon chimed in, mustering support from the rest of Berlin.

  * * *

  In late October of 1954 the planning began. Graffunder’s architects and draftsmen in white smocks moved into the Friedrichsfelde palace. “Design Agency Building Construction II, Greater Berlin, Tierpark Group” the white sign next to the doorway read. Because the fire department had shut off the furnace for safety reasons, they were soon freezing in the drafty mansion.

  One of the architects was Heinz Tellbach, a twenty-three-year-old Graffunder knew from their student days at the Building Academy in Neukölln, and whom he’d now recruited for his collective. It was a promising time for young architects—most of the older ones had died in the war or fled to the West, and the young GDR wanted a fresh workforce with fresh ideas. But while Graffunder was able to travel and gather inspiration from zoos around Europe, his aides had to settle for those in nearby Leipzig and Halle. For them, and for so many others involved in the project, all this was terra incognita. And a first inspection of the grounds left them with some odd impressions of what they’d have to work around: in addition to the illicit bungalow colony that had sprung up on the outskirts of the park, there was also a Red Army training site, which was still in active use.

  Dathe likewise had no practical experience in designing and building animal enclosures. The only construction he’d overseen in Leipzig entailed a few reroofings and some fence replacements. Now he had to design an entire zoo—and a zoo of the future, no less.

  The plan was to start by building enclosures for hardy hoofed animals—deer, camels, and buffalo—as these did not require elaborate heating. Since the architects did not know how tall the individual animals would grow to be, Dathe took them to the sites where the various stables and fences should be placed. Dathe would often come to an abrupt stop somewhere and bend his arms in front of his chest, as though wanting to gauge something with his bare hands. “How much is one yard?” he’d ask the group, and one of the architects would show him on a measuring tape. “No, t
hat’s too little,” Dathe would then usually say. He’d stretch out his arms even more and say, “Add this much to it.” The architects would hasten to measure the distance between his hands. And thus the first site plan came into being.

  Dathe liked young Tellbach. He called him by his nickname, Teddy, as though he’d known him forever. He also liked Tellbach’s wife, and enjoyed flirting with her when she came to pick up her husband from work. He made a habit of winking at her—and sometimes at her husband as well, but only at meetings when the head architect, Heinz Graffunder, launched into one of his long discourses about politics. When Tellbach’s first daughter was born, Dathe sent the couple a telegram that read, “Congratulations on the animal park’s first breeding success.” Once he had come up with a good joke, there was no stopping him from telling it.

  His own family, who remained in Leipzig, rarely saw him during those months. In Berlin, Dathe lived in sublets or shabby rooming houses. Every morning he cursed the city anew. When his driver picked him up at seven o’clock, they would have to search for a restaurant that served breakfast. Hardly any were open at this hour, so most of the time they wound up at some smoke-filled, gloomy train station dining room that served leftovers from the previous evening.

  He had only two or at most three days at a stretch in Berlin to get everything set up for the construction of the Tierpark before he had to go back to Leipzig. Schneider was not about to let Dathe neglect his duties there, which included training his successor.

  Lothar Dittrich had just recently arrived at the zoo as a research aide—an unpaid position, as was then customary. Instead of earning money, the twenty-two-year-old could gain experience, and at the start of the new year he would be promoted to a paid assistant. Dittrich had already known Dathe from the university, where Dathe had lectured on the taxonomy of vertebrates, a terribly dry subject. But Dathe had such a vivid narrative flair that Dittrich found some of his descriptions unforgettable, such as his account of eels, whose slimy exterior enables them to move across land to get to their spawning grounds in the sea. “Anyone who has held an eel in his hands knows what slippery means,” Dathe told his students. And he described the typical zigzag flight patterns of small wading birds called snipes by saying, “If the hunter takes aim during the ‘zig,’ it’s already up to the ‘zag.’ ” This casual approach appealed to his students.

  Over time, a friendship would form between the two men, but for now Dathe was Dittrich’s superior. He took Dittrich along on his morning rounds and showed him how to write reports about the animals’ latest developments, filling him in on the individual quirks of each animal—which tiger was nervous, which seal irritable.

  As if that were not enough, Dathe spent his spare time—not that he had any—writing his postdoctoral thesis.

  * * *

  Somewhere around this time, Heinrich Dathe stood on the balcony of the dilapidated Friedrichsfelde palace and spoke into a recording device that Karin Rohn held in front of him. Rohn, a young radio reporter, was interviewing him for a new program in which Dathe would report on the developments in the Tierpark. Working with journalists was a tricky matter; Dathe couldn’t stand the idea of reporters covering the zoo without speaking with him personally. He liked Karin Rohn right away, perhaps because the way she rolled her “r”s reminded him of his wife. He told her about his vision for a spacious nature park with moats rather than fences and bars. Then he took a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, unfolded it, and pointed to the path that led southeast from the palace. “You see,” he said, “this will be a promenade with rhododendron bushes, and over there, large colorful parrots will be sitting on swings. And camels will graze on the Linné meadows.”

  Rohn did not know what to trust less—her ears or her eyes. She was looking at bare trees and an overgrown pathway. Behind her the palace’s stucco crumbled, giving the impression of an abandoned robber baron’s castle. She couldn’t stop thinking of the meat ration tickets in her pocket. “Berlin is still broken,” she thought, “and he’s talking about a nature park?”

  While the architects were completing their sketches in the palace, construction began on the first of the animal enclosures and walkways in early April 1955. This piecemeal start was necessitated in part by a particularly harsh and long winter, even by Berlin standards. Time was now short; the opening ceremonies were to be held on July 2.

  It seemed almost impossible to construct a zoo in three months and so the public was asked to pitch in. Volunteer work had enabled the construction of Stalinallee, the main thoroughfare through the eastern part of the city, two years before. Now, in Friedrichsfelde, people shoveled sand, leveled paths, and cleared out undergrowth. Volunteers were rewarded with stickers for their service cards, and anyone who collected enough stickers got a badge. But that was not the point. The point was to contribute to the development of socialism—at least that was the official line.

  The idea caught on. Numerous construction companies and volunteers helped after work and on Sundays to build the Tierpark, putting in roughly 100,000 hours. Schoolchildren with tin cans went through streetcars to collect money, or searched Wuhlheide Public Park for beechnuts and acorns to use as food for the boars and deer in the Tierpark. Anyone who came across a brick brought it to Friedrichsfelde, because everything was needed there. Working in the Tierpark became one of the state’s most popular unpaid projects. Heinrich Dathe sensed the outbreak of a veritable zoo fever.

  The West German media saw the matter differently. A writer at the weekly newspaper Die Zeit made no attempt to hide his malicious glee on a visit to Friedrichsfelde in May 1955, a few months before the Tierpark opened. “Retirees, schoolchildren, Free German Youth members, and a handful of workers are now digging in Friedrichsfelde to make the first enclosures ready for occupancy,” he wrote. “There is not a hint of enthusiasm for this construction. The only sign of initiative so far has emanated from the single animal inhabitant of the ‘world’s greatest animal park’: Dr. Dathe’s guard dog, who never stops barking.”

  Spectacled Bears from the Stasi

  The first animals were brought to the Tierpark from the nearby Lichtenberg freight depot, with hundreds of gawking spectators lining the streets. They’d never before seen a camel led through the streets of Berlin on a leash. The first animals were gifts from other Eastern European zoos and GDR businesses. The Halle Zoo contributed a Bactrian camel and a black stork. The city of Strausberg donated ostriches and a bed manufacturer more storks. The children’s magazine Bummi collected money from readers for two giraffes, the ministry for heavy industry and the newspaper Neues Deutschland each provided an elephant, and the State-Owned Refrigeration Company and the Köpenick Consumers’ Cooperative gave polar bears. Johannes Dieckmann, president of the People’s Chamber, the GDR’s unicameral legislature, donated a nilgai antelope from India, and the State-Owned Painting and Glazing Company five guanacos, creatures closely related to llamas. The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, contributed two spectacled bears. “Our comrades felt that one spectacled bear would be bored, and the response was so robust that the call for funding brought in triple the planned sum of money,” the official communication stated.

  On the morning of July 2, 1955, Dathe, GDR president Wilhelm Pieck, and Berlin deputy mayor Friedrich Ebert walked a few steps ahead of a swarm of people headed in the direction of the Friedrichsfelde palace. Katharina Heinroth and Werner Schröder were in the crowd. Dathe considered it essential for them to be present at the opening ceremony, to show that Berlin’s two zoos were not working at cross-purposes. When he was warned not to invite his Western counterparts, he threatened, “Then you will have to do without me.”

  The throng of people stood still in front of red tape stretched across their path. Actually, when seventy-nine-year-old Pieck finally cut the tape with a tiny pair of scissors to celebrate the park’s official opening, construction crews and volunteers were still laboring away in other corners of the extensive grounds. They would remain hard
at work in the coming months—and indeed years. But unlike so many other projects made possible by volunteer work, East Berliners identified with this one. This was not some grand boulevard that would never be completed, a project to be appreciated primarily by people like the city’s head architect, who would gaze down upon it from his penthouse apartment in the neighborhood’s choicest building. This was the people’s animal park, which they themselves had helped build.

  * * *

  For the state government, the new zoo in the capital was an important showcase project. And its director was a person of particular interest, especially when he was as fond of travel and socializing as Heinrich Dathe. Shortly after the Tierpark opened and Dathe was on one of his visits to Leipzig, a member of the Stasi called up his secretary, Irene Engelmann. “We would appreciate your keeping us informed about the Tierpark. It’s all quite exciting,” the man said in a friendly tone. “And Herr Doktor surely gets quite a few visitors from colleagues from the West.”

  Engelmann didn’t know how to respond. When Dathe came back, she wasted no time in telling him about the ominous call. Dathe knew just what it meant, and it was the last thing he needed. He jotted down the telephone number, picked up the receiver, and dialed. Without waiting to find out if he had the right person on the line, he shouted, “I refuse to let anyone put tabs on me in this manner,” and slammed down the receiver. His overzealous entry into the Nazi party in 1932 had come close to ruining his career; he was not about to let that happen again.